It was unique when it first showed up. But on e.g. .NET, you already had all the same stuff with WinForms back in 2002.

Indeed, WinForms is so similar to VCL, even when it comes to the overall hierarchy (Object <- Component <- Control sound familiar?), you might look at it and wonder if Microsoft hired someone from Borland to work on .NET back in the day. Of course, it was only their chief architect. ~

> WinForms is so similar to VCL

But very inferior. And is slow in contrast.

Delphi is #1 for GUI. Period. Nothing alike, No QT, No Wx, No Winforms or XALM or anything else.

Just what is available in the lowest tier is far more complete that any other tool in the market, and you have sourcecode for the VCL and related components.

The recent Qt Quick designer is miles ahead of what Delphi provides: http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/05/24/qt-quick-designer-qt-creat...

That is hard to believe. I test QT a few months ago (osx) and the toolset is the same joke as any other C++ toolset. Powerfull in the inside if you pray to the proper gods.

Have you use Delphi?

> Have you use Delphi?

yes, though I have to admit the last version I did use was Delphi 7. What did you find lacking from Qt ?

Delphi still has an advantage over .net - no dependencies, you can ship a single exe without worrying about dll's, which makes it great for sme's

They are finally fixing it with .NET Native and CoreRT, but to enjoy them you need to target UWP or .NET Core apps.

FWIW, there is a package for .Net, Fody Costura or something like that, which allows you to embed dependencies as resources in the executable file.

You can ship it as a single executable if you statically linked midaslib. Most data processing needs that.

No need for the .Net-runtime on target computer? Or more like a runnable jar-file that "only" depends on an installed jvm?

Yes, to prove, get any crack exe and run pexplore on it. Very likely you will see some Delphi dfm or list of units compiled into the constant area.

I think I misunderstood - I thought you meant there was a way to ship slim c# exe files.

Yes there is, with .NET Core you just ship everything together, it no longer depends on the installed runtime.

You can also AOT compile to a pure binary .exe with Mono or the ongoing CoreRT being developed.

UWP apps are compiled to a static executable via .NET Native compiler (uses VC++ backend).

oh no, I wouldn't even dare try that.

I tried WinForms 10 years ago and IMHO it could not compare in quality to VCL.

Great in theory, but in practice one ofter another component supplier is just going away. And the still available components are often barely maintained and often not very well documented. For some components the documentation is still pre unicode for example.